Gladstone

Gladstone

Exhibition Text

An oddball iron

Unlike most iron meteorites, Gladstone probably did not come from the core of a differentiated asteroid. Its unusual iron includes silicate minerals, which in a fully differentiated asteroid would have floated to the mantle and crust. Gladstone may have formed in an unmelted chondrite when an explosive impact melted a pool of lava, and molten iron sank to the bottom and hardened.